Parashat Noach
Dr. David Neufeld, Dean of Learning Support
A lot happens in this week’s parasha (Torah portion). The main event is the Flood: God warning Noah about the Flood, the preparations for the Flood, the Flood itself, and its aftermath. It also contains the story of the Tower of Babel, plus 52 verses detailing the line of many generations of Noah’s descendants–culminating in the introduction of Abram and Sarai. It’s the longest parasha in the book of Genesis.
Most of us know the story of the Flood, but here’s a quick summary of the Tower of Babel: The people of the Earth, who all speak a common language and live in the same place, decide to build a tower to reach all the way into the heavens. Seeing this, God says, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.” (Genesis 11:6). In other words, “together they can do anything!” This seems to scare God a bit, so to stop them from working together, God mixes up their languages and scatters them across the earth.
The Flood is a pretty compelling story in and of itself, and so is the Tower of Babel. So why combine both into one super-sized parasha? When I asked myself this question, I realized that for me the two stories combined are a perfect metaphor for inclusion.
During the Flood, Noah is tasked with bringing two of every kind of land animal onto the ark–literally every kind: all the beasts, all the birds, everything that creeps and crawls upon the earth, and so on. The Torah lists these different categories of animals not once, not twice, but seven times, emphasizing that the inclusion of all of them, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, was literally necessary for the survival of the earth. Furthermore, Noah and his family had to set up an environment, in a relatively small and enclosed boat, that could work for every kind of animal–each with its own unique habitat, food, and way of being in the world. To me, that doesn’t sound too different from how we run our school–meeting all sorts of different needs under the same roof.
Beyond that, can you imagine what the inside of the ark must have been like? All of those smelly animals making noise, eating, drinking, doing what comes after eating and drinking… and so on, all in one small space? To me, that speaks even more deeply of inclusion–it can be challenging, chaotic, and messy, but it’s critical to our survival.
Then in Babel, we see what can happen when inclusion is passed down through generations and a community is united. The power of people, when they work together and collaborate, is too strong even for God. So strong, in fact, that God decides the only thing to do is to create some difference, separate everyone, and make it impossible to work together in the same way again.
We have all kinds of differences in our school too–differences in race, gender, and sexuality, level of religious observance, commute times, learning differences, teaching styles, and more. We can’t, nor should we, make those differences disappear. We should honor those differences as Noah did while creating the ark. At the same time, though, our job as a community is to put us all back together into one unified whole where everyone feels seen, cared for, and needed; valued, and important. Nothing can stop us then.
Not even a flood.
